The following announcement was in the Wash. state Bar News. Please feel free to copy and post on other suitable lists/boards: State archivists invited to restore and preserve some four million court documents left unexamined for over a century in file cabinets in the St. Louis Courthouse have found nearly 300 lawsuits by slaves seeking their freedom between 1809 and 1865. Missouri enacted legal safeguards to protect slaves from retaliation if they sued, and set aside tax monies to pay for legal counsel. There were three grounds for suits: claims that they were free and kidnapped into slavery; that slaves had proviously bought their freedom or that they had been set free by their masters. Defendant slaveholders had to put up a bond against failure to appear or selling the slaves before trial, some judges took plaintiff slaves into the courts' protection and hired them out for labor, allowing them to keep their wages if they won. Notable among the cases discovered is the pleading filed by Dred Scott in 1846, alleging that with his master, an Army surgeon, he had lived in free states for years and could not become a slave again when he was brought to Missouri. Scott won his case, but the U.S. Surpreme Court ruled in 1857 that since he was African American and not a citizen, he had no right to sue. Missouri stopped funding slave suits shortly before the decision, and after it the suits trickled to a halt. The complete records of all 283 freedom suits are available for download at http://www.stlcourtrecords.wusl.edu Joan B "Joan Best" <joanbest@earthlink.net>